Nicholson Baker ’79’s quest to save old newspapers from oblivion. by Edgar Allen Beem

Nicholson Baker '79

Nicholson Baker, a tall, scholarly man, balding and bearded, is perusing old bound volumes of the New York World through rimless glasses when he comes across a sensational full-color 1952 article about Marilyn Monroe entitled “They Call Her The Blowtorch Blonde.” American’s Sweetheart is wearing a ruffle bandeau that makes her look like a Tahitian princess. Baker is so amused and taken with both the image and the title that he immediately places the bound volume beneath a quintet of spotlights and, using a hand-held digital camera, takes a picture of it. The Marilyn layout will soon thereafter appear on www.oldpapers.org.

Oldpapers.org is the website of the American Newspaper Repository, the nonprofit corporation Baker established in 1999 as part of his campaign to save old newspapers from disappearing entirely as libraries microfilm and discard them. The other major weapon in Baker’s preservationist arsenal is Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, a book that rocked the library world last year with its detailed indictment of major libraries—principally the Library of Congress—for failing to preserve actual copies of the country’s greatest newspapers.

The American Newspaper Repository occupies a 6,000-square-foot space on the first floor of a former textile mill in Rollinsford, New Hampshire, just a short walk across the Salmon Falls River from the village of South Berwick, Maine, where Baker lives. The rest of the 1848 brick mill building is occupied by a thermal underwear company, several other small businesses, and some artists’ studios. The repository’s large, cool rectangular factory room is filled with approximately 5,000 bound volumes of newspapers—chief among them Joseph Pulitzer’s World, New York Herald Tribune, Chicago Tribune, and the New York Times—arrayed on high metal shelves and wooden pallets on the floor. Hundreds of institutions own these newspapers on microfilm, but that’s exactly the problem. The wholesale embrace of microform reproduction by libraries and research institutions mean that real copies of these newspapers are becoming extinct.

“You can’t get more important urban documents,” says Baker, surveying the bound volumes stacked before him. “The New York World used to publish a million copies a day and now there is only one.”
Nicholson Baker, forty-five, is an unlikely savior. He is not a librarian, historian, archivist, or conservator. He is a writer, a novelist, and essayist whose peculiar body of writings has in common an almost obsessive concern for minutiae.

“I think of myself as thorough,” says Baker, mildly objecting to the use of the word obsession. Okay, saving old newspapers is not Baker’s obsession, but it’s pretty darn close.

Nick Baker was born and brought up in Rochester, New York, where his father ran an ad agency from the basement of the family home. Trained as a bassoonist, Baker entered Eastman School of Music with the intention of becoming a composer, but in school, he recognized the limits of his own musical talents and gave up on a career in music. Inspired in part by Frank Conroy’s wonderful 1967 childhood memoir Stop-Time (in which Conroy heads off to Haverford College to make a new start in the world for himself), Baker transferred to Haverford where he fell in love with literature and a bookish young woman named Margaret Brentano. Baker and Brentano were married in 1985 and, two years later, Baker embarked on his literary career with the publication of his first novel, The Mezzanine.

The Mezzanine established Nicholson Baker as the fictional master of trivia, the novel consisting as it does of a sustained meditation on such things as why straws don’t sink in milk cartons and whether hot-air blowers are more sanitary than towels for drying hands. The entire book takes place during the course of a character’s lunchtime escalator ride. Baker followed his debut with a novel in the form of a man’s thoughts while bottle feeding his baby (Room Temperature), another that explores the inner life and thoughts of a nine-year-old girl (The Everlasting Story of Nory), a book about the author’s obsession (there’s that word again) with writer John Updike (U and I), and his bestsellers, a pair of erotic novels—The Fermata (about a young man who uses his ability to stop time to undress women) and Vox (the phone sex novel that Clinton paramour Monica Lewinsky gave to her libidinous boss).

Both Baker’s novels and his essays are characterized by a penchant for taking the incidental seriously. Shoelaces, fingernail clippers, movie projectors, punctuation, the history of the word lumber, putting on socks, and picking one’s nose have all come in for close texture scrutiny in Baker’s work.
“My books do home in on certain details in my life, but that’s what we think about,” Baker explains. “I try to put things in their true proportions. “
Nicholson Baker’s talent, then, lies in questioning the unquestioned and paying close attention to the unexamined. Micro-filming old newspapers and magazines, for instance, seems like such a convenient solution to making these documents available for posterity, but, as Baker argues in Double Fold, it also results in the loss of the real thing if the originals are destroyed and discarded in the process. If there is a subtext to virtually everything Nicholson has written, it might be the search for reality in an over-mediated and intellectualized world.

Baker’s library offensive began in 1994 with an article he published in The New Yorker about the passing of the venerable card catalogue from American libraries. The New Yorker piece branded Nicholson Baker as a crank and a library critic when, in fact, he is a great fan of libraries.
“The library is such a good idea, such a good idea,” Baker enthuses. “The American people are publishing all this stuff and the library is a central place to keep what we can’t own individually. Why it’s so troubling is that the people who inherited this great idea don’t make the decisions we thought they were making. The idea only works if you keep up the things you are collecting.”

In the course of haunting the stacks of libraries across the country, Baker discovered the real tragedy was not the passing of the card catalogue but rather the discarding of books and periodicals by major research libraries. Having been attacked in academic circles for not properly documenting his card catalogue article, Baker set about an exhaustive investigation of the history and practice of microfilm reproduction of newspapers that resulted in a 370-page book with 80 pages of footnotes and references. Double Fold takes its title from the test (folding the lower right corner of a random page back and forth) that many libraries use to determine the brittleness—and therefore the usefulness—of old books and newspapers. The book is so dense with the arcane history of microfilming technology and policy that Baker believes few of its initial critics within the library world had actually read it. Baker never suggests that every library everywhere should save decades and centuries worth of old newspapers. He simply argues that some major research libraries should maintain actual runs of the newspapers that reported the life of the nation as it was lived.

“This is the marrow. This is the historical center of the twentieth century,” says Baker of the newspapers reposing in the Rollinsford Mill. “This is what happened and appeared before the public in the daily newspaper.”

Baker acquired most of the American Newspaper Repository’s collection in the fall of 1999 at an auction of newspapers being discarded by the British Library in London. After cashing in a personal retirement account for $50,000, Baker received major grants from the McArthur Foundation ($150,000) and the Knight Foundation ($100,000) to purchase runs of close to 100 newspapers and magazines and establish the repository. Smaller contributions that have come in response to the publication of Double Fold and the media attention it has generated have helped pay the American Newspaper Repository’s $2,000 a month rent. Baker estimates that he now has about five months’ worth of rent money on hand and is in the process of another round of fundraising.

Baker says the primary response he has had from libraries is that preserving old news papers is an “outrageously expensive and near impossible task.” He rejects this vehemently.

“The amount of space newspapers take up is not that great. That is a myth,” insists Baker. “Newspapers are wonderfully compact. They have the money to do this. We’re talking about maybe two Best Buys [to house a national newspaper repository]. The National Endowment for the Humanities has spent $115 million on microfilming. Most of that money has contributed to the loss of history rather than the preservation of history.”
Baker also rejects the argument that saving hard copies of old newspapers is not cost-effective because they sit gathering dust for years and get very little use

“That’s the point,” Baker argues. “Research libraries are supposed to hold onto things that are little used. That’s where all the discoveries are made. That’s where the beauties are.”

In the conclusion of Double Fold, Baker makes four recommendations: 1) that libraries publish lists of the material they are planning to discard, 2) that the Library of Congress lease or build a true national depository for old books and periodicals, 3) that several libraries begin saving current newspapers in bound form, and 4) that the National Endowment for the Humanities either abolish the U.S. Newspaper and Brittle Books program, or require that all microfilms and digital scanning be nondestructive and that originals be saved.

The universal embrace of microfilm reproduction is as true in Maine as everywhere else. Though the Maine Historical Society is cited in Double Fold as an example of a library that saves newspaper originals even after it has microfilmed them, Maine Historical Society only microfilms “historical” newspapers. It does not save or microfilm current newspapers. The irony here, of course, is that the only reason historical newspapers exist is that someone saw fit to save them when they were new. In the future, thanks to microfilming, there may not be any historical newspapers.
Publishers are often to source of a last resort for actual copies of their newpapers, but, in Portland, the publishers of Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram stopped binding copies decades ago. The publishers of the Bangor Daily News, however, do keep bound archival copies of their newspaper. The entire run of the Bangor Daily News (1899 to the present) is kept under lock and key in a specially designed 600-square-foot room, but there is no access to the public or to scholars.

“How will people be able to do local history in seventy-five years?” says Nicholson Baker. “It depends on what you keep now. I have made the point that the Library of Congress is not going to do it. We’ve got to be responsible for our own local libraries.”

Predictably, Nick and Margaret Baker have become active in their local library and historical society since moving to South Berwick in 1998. They are helping to inventory the local holdings, and Margaret is compiling oral histories from some of the elderly people she meets through volunteering in the Meals on Wheels program.

The Bakers and their two children, Alice, now fifteen, and Elias, now eight, moved to South Berwick from Berkeley, California, largely, says Baker, in search of affordable housing in a quiet town where he could write without distraction. They purchased an old dairy farm on the edge of the village based on the sole criteria that Nick, 6’4”, be able to fit through the doors on the second floor.

“We just liked the sanity of the place,” says Baker of the move to South Berwick. “It’s turned out to be a really good decision. I love it here.”
Ironically, the quiet, writerly life Nicholson was searching for along the Maine-New Hampshire border has largely eluded him since the publication of Double Fold. “It’s made me a more public kind of writer than I’d prefer to be,” says Baker of the publicity and debate engendered by Double Fold. “That’s why I’ve deliberately stayed away from living in big cities.”

Since Double Fold was published, Baker has been in constant demand to speak about and defend his position on saving old newspapers at meetings of the American Library Association and the Bibliographical Society of America, and at libraries from Boston to Seattle. Typically, his speeches take the form of a slide show. His slides from the World, for instance, graphically make the point that nineteenth-and early twentieth-century newspapers were far more colorful, lively, and creative than newspapers today, a point that can be lost in grainy black microfilm reproduction.

“When people see what I’m referring to,” says Baker, “when they see pictures of the originals and pictures of the microfilm, it’s the pictures that convince people.”

While Baker does not think his old newspaper crusade has made any difference at all in the policies of the Library of Congress, he does believe Double Fold has raised public and professional awareness of the value of preserving authenticity.

“The notion that to get a good digital copy you have to destroy the original is now being questioned,” he says.

Though he is a private man somewhat uncomfortable as a public figure, Baker says, “I do like the kind of low-level muckraking I do,” and he plans to continue it. His current plan is to write fiction and nonfiction in alternating years. His new novel, A Box of Matches (Random House) came out in January.

As to the future of the American Newspaper Repository, Baker hopes it will move out of the Rollinsford mill in the not too distant future. He is currently seeking a permanent home for the old newspapers he rescued from oblivion.

“I can’t be the keeper of the nation’s newspapers,” says the writer from South Berwick. “I’m hoping this whole thing will have a happy ending and become part of a big research collection.”